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and activity. For the first time-at all events, so it is believed the Hellenic philosophy found itself directly in contact with the Oriental religions and philosophies-audacious, grandiose, unfathomable-which until then it had known only by hearsay or by niggardly fragments. The Gnostics contributed, among other doctrines, those of Zoroaster, while the mysterious Essenes, theosophists and theurgists, who came from the shores of the Dead Sea, and rather mysteriously disappeared (although in the days of Philo they were forty thousand strong) or were eventually absorbed by the Gnostics, doubtless represented the Hindu element more directly; the cabalists, who existed before the cabala was committed to writing, infused fresh life into the doctrines of Persia, Chaldea, and Egypt; the Christians woke up to find themselves between the Bible and the legends of India; and the Neoplatonists, who might more correctly be called the Neo-Orphics or Neo-Pythagoreans, returned to the old philosophers of the sixth century before our era, striving to find in them truths too long ignored, which were suddenly restored to daylight by the revelations from the East.

We need not here investigate this effervescence, which constitutes one of the most intense, and, in some respects, most fruitful crises ever recorded in the history of human thought. For

our present purposes it is enough to note that from the point of view of the idea of God, of the First Cause, of the pre-cosmic Spirit, or the absolute Reality, which precedes all being, manifest or conditioned, as from the point of view of the origin, purpose, and economy of the universe and the nature of good and evil, it teaches us nothing that we have not found in previous religions and philosophies. The manifestations of the Unknowable, the division of the primordial Unity, and the descent of spirit into substance are attributed to the Logos; they change their name without lessening the surrounding darkness. In the attempt to find an explanation of the insoluble contradictions involved by an impassive god and a universe in incessant movement, an unknowable god who is finally known in every detail, a good god who creates, desires, or permits evil, men imagined, first, a threefold hypostasis, and then a host of intermediate divinities, demiurges, or reduplications of God, eons, or divine faculties and attributes personified, angels, and demons. In the backwaters of these specializations, distinctions, and subdivisions, subtle, ingenious, and inextricable, the simple though tremendous confession of the Unknowable was soon submerged by such a tide of words that it was no longer visible.1 Before long it was

1 The Gnostics taught that the Supreme Being, or Perfect

completely forgotten, was no longer referred to; and the Supreme Unknown engendered so many and so familiar secondary divinities that it no longer dared to remind men that they could never know it. Of course the greater the number of phrases and explanations, the more completely were the primitive verities, on which all was founded, effaced and obscured; so that after men had attained, or regained, in Philo, and above all in Plotinus, the loftiest summits of thought, they descended, on the one hand, to the lucubrations of that Chinese puzzle, the famous "Pistis-Sophia," attributed to Valentinian, and on the other to the pretended revelations of Iamblichus concerning the Egyptian mysteries-revelations which revealed nothing whatever-and the whole Gnostic and Neoplatonic movement ended, with the successors of Valentinian and those who continued the work of Porphyry and Proclus, by sinking into the most puerile logomachy and the most vulgar witchcraft.

We need not, therefore, consider the movement any further: not that the study of this effervescence would be devoid of interest; on the contrary, there are few moments of history

Eon, or, as we should say, the Eternal, could be approached only by a number of emanations or eons. In other words, these were regarded as eternal Beings who acted as intermediaries between the Perfect Eon and mankind, and, being joined together formed the Perfect Eon.-TRANS.

at which the mind has been forced to encounter problems of so novel, complex, and difficult a nature, or at which it has given proof of greater power, vitality, and enthusiasm. But what I have already said of this period is enough for my purpose, which is merely to show that the occultists of Greece, and, above all, those of the middle ages, who interest us more especially because they are closer to us, so that our memory of them is more vivid, have nothing essential to teach us that we have not already learned from India, Egypt, and Persia.

WE

CHAPTER VIII

THE CABALA

I

E come at length to the cabala, which is in some sort the vital center of occultism as it is commonly understood.

This word, cabala, which covers doctrines that are in general or very imperfectly understood, is for some enveloped in mystery and illusion of a perturbing nature, at which they all but shudder as though they saw therein a reflection of infernal fires; while for others it evokes merely an unreadable jumble of absurd superstitions, of so much sheer nonsense, of fantastic formulæ that lay claim to satanic powers; childish riddles and obsolete lucubrations which are no longer worthy of serious examination. As a matter of fact the cabala merits neither this excess of honor nor this indignity. To begin with, there are two cabalas: the cabala properly so called, the theoretical cabala, the only one with which we need concern ourselves; and the practical cabala, which is merely a sort of senile dermatosis, that gradually invades the less noble parts of

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